With the increasingly stringent requirement worldwide for environmentally friendly products, electronic devices that include heavy metals such as lead are likely to be slowly phased out. Therefore, electronic devices using bare copper as the soldering surfaces are slowly being replaced by those plated with other materials on such surfaces. Full plating of nickel/palladium/gold (Ni/Pd/Au) on all surfaces of the leadframe can avoid employing lead on the soldering surfaces; however, such surfaces have reduced adhesion to the molding compound.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an improved leadframe.